macOS Big Sur brought along a massive UI overhaul to the Mac. It added the control center, a new notification center with redesigned widgets, and a lot more. It also introduced a new icon design for apps. That’s fine, but the problem is that a lot of developers have not updated their app icons to this new design. That means your Mac can look inconsistent and rather weird. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix. Here’s how to change all app icons to Big Sur style icons with Terminal on Mac.

There are plenty of ways to change icons on a Mac. However, for an update as huge as Big Sur, manually changing app icons can be tiresome, which is why we are showing you an easier and faster way to do this.

  • Change App Icons to Big Sur Style with Terminal
  • Change App Icons Manually with Finder
  • Use Replacicon to Change Icons

1. Change App Icons to Big Sur Style with Terminal

This first method requires some effort on your part, but it’s completely free and it changes almost every app icon to the new design. Here’s what you need to do.

You must have NodeJS installed on your Mac. If you don’t, you can download it from this link.

The Terminal should show the version of NodeJS installed on your computer. If it doesn’t, you should install NodeJS again.

Now that we have the NodeJS installation out of the way, let’s start fixing the app icons.

cd ../..

cd Applications/

sudo npm i -g iconsur

  • You will see a progress bar show up, and iconsur will start being downloaded and installed on your system.

sudo iconsur set [app name]

  • For example, I want to change the icon for Microsoft Edge, so I’ll use the following command. That “\” you see after “Microsoft” is an escape character. You will need to use it for apps with spaces in the same, such as Microsoft\ Word, Microsoft\ Excel, etc.

sudo iconsur set Microsoft\ Edge.app

You can repeat the sudo iconsur set [app name] Terminal command for as many apps as you like.

2. Change App Icons Manually with Finder

If you don’t want to use the Terminal for some reason, or if you just need to change the icon for a single app and iconsur feels overkill, you can also change icons with Finder. Here’s how.

That’s it, Photoshop is now using the new app icon that I set. You can do this for pretty much any app on your Mac.

If, unlike me, you don’t like to play in the Terminal app, you should check out Replacicon. This app automatically scans all installed apps on your Mac and looks for icons for them on the web. You can then choose which icons to use for replacing your old app icons.

Easily Change App Icons to Big Sur Style Icons

While I expect most major developers will update their Mac app icons to be in line with Apple’s new design, it could take some time. So it’s a good idea to take things into your own hands until that happens, and change your app icons yourself. This way, your Mac will look cleaner, and more consistent as well.